Corn Belt as an Enterprise-Naming Custom in the United States

Enterprises, be they for-profit businesses or not-for-profit organizations, require names to differentiate themselves from other entities. Since the late nineteenth century, US American entrepreneurs, corporate boards, and organizational founders have chosen to use Corn Belt or some spelling variant to identify their enterprises. This mixed-method research article examines the United States at the beginning of the use of Corn Belt as a vernacular term for an agricultural region. It identifies the earliest uses of Corn Belt as an inspiration for enterprise names; diachronically tracks Corn Belt enterprises in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, one of the core locations of the naming practice; and presents the enterprises across the United States that greeted the public in 2020 with Corn Belt in their names. The article highlights a naming practice by which residents of a rather amorphous agricultural zone bring a sense of place to their enterprises by bestowing on them a commonly known and highly respected identifier that many in the United States find immediately familiar. A study in traditional dialectology, this article brings together linguistics and geography to heighten public and scholarly appreciation of the spatial distribution of an onomastic marker in one part of the world.


Introduction
Writing a century ago, geographer J. Russell Smith penned a profound piece of prose. About the midwestern Corn Belt of the United States, he wrote, "The Corn Belt is a gift of the gods-the rain god, the sun god, the ice god and the gods of geology" (1925,290). Geology's gods provided the wide stretches of open land underlain by nearly horizontal rock layers. Courtesy of the ice god, continental glaciers enhanced soil fertility, smoothed many of the remaining surface irregularities, and facilitated the deployment of today's gargantuan crophandling machinery. The god of sunshine delivered (and still delivers) an abundance of corn heat units. The rain god provided (and provides) the intense but short-lived summer rainstorms and high summer-season humidity that corn (maize) needs to mature its grain. Corn Belt agriculturalists know how to take full advantage of these fortunate circumstances.
The Corn Belt is a vernacular region. Vernacular or perceptual regions have no firm, legally defined boundaries, either delimited on official maps or demarcated on the ground. Instead, each person is free to determine on their own where regions like Gold Coast or Upstate South Carolina or Corn Belt begin and end. Widely recognized cultural geographer Terry G. Jordan said vernacular regions exist as part of popular or folk culture. Rather than being the intellectual creation of the professional geographer, the vernacular region is the product of the spatial perception of average people…such regions are the composites of the mental maps of the population (1978,293).
There is another way to delimit the Corn Belt, however, a way that none of the aforementioned authors employed. That approach, which I adopt for this investigation, involves looking at the practice of naming enterprises, both businesses and not-for-profit organizations. In using this method, I try to answer several questions. When did Corn Belt come into use as a term to identify a region of the United States? Where and when did early enterprises pick up Corn Belt as part of their names? How has Corn Belt held up through time as an enterprise name in one of the core communities of the region Bloomington-Normal, in McLean County, Illinois? The largest county by area in Illinois, McLean led all three thousand plus United States counties in terms of corn and soybean production in 2020 (Eggert and Heather 2021, A1). Along with these research questions, this investigation also seeks to determine which enterprises in 2020 had some version of Corn Belt (perhaps Cornbelt, CornBelt, Corn-belt, or Corn-Belt) in their names and where these enterprises were located across the United States.
Identifying a region and tracing its roots as an informally named component of the human landscape is not an exercise in linguistic trivia. Rather, as Zelinsky said, it is "a justifiable, even necessary, pursuit" (1980,2) if we are to understand the human realities of Earth's surface-where we all reside. Geographers are not alone in building and analyzing regions. Practitioners of various other disciplines across the scientific universe, including dialectologists and onomasticians, do the same. As I model herein, this technique of mapping a vernacular region on the basis of naming practices is a transferrable methodology-one that I will address later in this article with additional examples of what I or others could investigate next.

Methodology
A combination of Internet sources, printed books, and personal contacts made this mixed-method research possible. Information about the first uses of Corn Belt to characterize crop regions of individual and clustered US states and of multiple states came mainly from newspaper databases, as I searched for "Corn Belt," "Cornbelt," and "Corn-Belt." These databases included Nineteenth Century U. S. Newspapers; Newspapers.com; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times; and ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Chicago Tribune. Names of early Corn Belt enterprises across the USA also came from the aforementioned newspaper databases, using the same three search terms: "Corn Belt," "Cornbelt," and "Corn-Belt." To conduct a longitudinal study of Corn Belt enterprises in and around Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, I turned to printed copies of city directories published by R. L. Polk and Company, Polk City Directories, City Directory Inc., Pantagraph Printing & Stationery, W. F. Curtis, Leader Printing, Western Publishing, and Equifax. These directories list businesses and not-for-profit organizations, including common-interest or purely social clubs. They typically provide a street address and, in many cases, name a principal officer. In total, I consulted 116 Bloomington-Normal city directories, 1855 through 2020, beginning with 1855 because it was the oldest available. Fifteen of the 116 directories (12.93 percent), mainly in the nineteenth century, covered two years rather than the more typical single year. In the biennial cases, when the run of an enterprise began or ended with such a directory, I opted always to use the first date in the pair. For instance, I listed the start or stop year of an enterprise as 1943 when the directory dates were 1943-1944. City directories were similar to but provide one with more information on each enterprise than would the telephone directories that Zelinsky (1980) used to collect enterprise names from 276 metropolitan areas of the United States and Canada for his article in which he mapped "The South," "The Middle West," "New England," etc.
For my nationwide contemporary list and map of Corn Belt enterprises, I began by searching in general online databases: Google Advanced Search, Super Pages, 411.com, Bing, Google, Yellowbook.com, and Business White Pages. I devoted considerable time to relatively recent items brought up via Newspapers.com over the period 2018-2020. Later I visited the websites of the 50 state Secretaries of State (SOS). All SOS offices provide a search tool allowing one to look for active and inactive entities by name. Of the 2020 enterprises I tabulated and mapped, roughly one-quarter (28.75 percent) came up due to these SOS searches. Google Earth allowed me to look into the front yards of questionable enterprises in the hope of discovering evidence of relevant activity at the address I found online. On numerous occasions, for clarification of their status, I reached out directly to enterprises via electronic mail, website query services, hard copy correspondence, and telephone calls. Were they still operational in 2020? What was the nature of the enterprise? Did an enterprise of exactly the same name in another state have any connection? Where should I locate the enterprise on my 2020 map when their website listed multiple addresses? Many such inquiries were successful, but some produced no response. When there was no response, I used my best judgment to resolve the dilemma.
General decision rules guided the research. My focus was on the enterprises themselves, on entities with personnel (leaders, employees, and volunteer members). I excluded product names such as Cornbelt Amine Liquid Herbicide; places with no assigned personnel like Corn Belt Park (in El Paso, Illinois); and nicknames for enterprises like Great Corn Belt Route (really the Wichita, Richfield & Trinidad Railroad). For the 2020 list and map of enterprises, I ignored inactive Corn Belt entities, of which there are scores across the country.
Among the many indicators of inactivity were disabled telephone numbers, no verifiable websites, or downgrades in activity status by the appropriate SOS. I included for consideration Corn Belt subdivisions of enterprises with a different name. For example, the Corn Belt Chapter of the Illinois Activity Directors Association got counted this way. I excluded spinoffs, like Corn Belt Decommissioning Trust, LLC, which carries a name derived legally from Iowa's Corn Belt Power Cooperative. When a multiple-site enterprise, like an athletic conference, had a clear headquarters community, I used that place as the official location. Otherwise, I chose one of the participating municipalities that seemed central to the enterprise. Finally, on the enterprise list and map for 2020, I included recurring events that involve organizing personnel like conventions (e.g., Indiana's Corn Belt Seed Conference) and competitive races (e.g., Iowa's Corn Belt Clash). Warntz (1957), Laingen (2012), and OED (2021) credited an article in the July 1882 issue of The Nation with the earliest known use of Corn Belt to name a region. Warntz wrote, "In 1882 there occurred what might have been the first printed use of the term 'corn belt' in the sense that the concept is now used […] Of course, the term was enclosed in quotation marks and was not used as a proper noun; yet, it represented the beginning of a trend" (43). That The Nation item, however, did not represent the beginning of anything. Writers had been identifying concentrations of corn production west of the Alleghenies as Corn Belt for many years prior to 1882. "The business of kiln-drying corn and grinding it into meal has become, all at once, quite common throughout the great Western corn belt-that is along a line of the rivers emptying into the north side of the Ohio [my emphasis]," said an untitled piece on page 2 in the Scioto (Ohio) Gazette of June 16, 1847. The author of that earliest known print reference had in mind corn cultivation in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.

Corn Belt Emerges as a Vernacular Region
Corn Belt references multiplied in the last half of the nineteenth century. By 1868, the Lancaster (Pennsylvania) Daily Evening Express was telling its readers that "In the great corn-belt running through Southern Iowa and Northern Missouri, Central Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, not more than three-fourths of the land which the farmers expected to devote to corn will be planted [my emphasis]" (2). In 1871, the New Orleans Times-Picayune said, "The corn belt lies between the 36 th and 40 th parallel of latitude, St. Louis being nearly in its centre [my emphasis]" (2). A couple of years later, The New York Times (1873, 3) conferred regional centrality on a different midwestern metropolis, saying, "The dispatches embraced reports from almost every county in the great corn belt through the States of Illinois, Iowa, and Kansas, of which Chicago is the primary market [my emphasis]." Corn Belt was enough in the news by 1884 for a humorist at the Wall Street News to report a father from "the great corn-belt region [my emphasis]" advising his son, who was setting out for New York City, that he could do his part to protect producer prices for that year's crop by telling the Wall Street bulls one thing about the potential yield and the bears something quite different (Boston Globe, 6).

Early Use of Corn Belt in Enterprise Names
By the late 1880s, Corn Belt was a familiar part of growing-season press coverage about the chances for a good corn crop in the Midwest and year-round conversations about land prices in this booming agricultural region. Roving correspondents, local newspaper stringers, editors back home, and readers of the papers knew the term and no doubt used it in everyday discourse. It was only a matter of time until somebody dropped Corn Belt into a new enterprise's name.
The place was Mitchell, Dakota Territory; the year was 1889. "Jas. S. Foster left Monday for New York via St. Paul," said a brief item in the January 31, 1889, Mitchell Daily Republican, "on business connected with the Corn Belt Investment Co [my emphasis]" (2). Corn Belt Investment Company, said a different Mitchell newspaper several months later, was "a new institution just incorporated by some of Mitchell's enterprising citizens, having as its object to invest in cheap Dakota lands, make real estate loans, and generally induce the investment of outside capital in this section" (Mitchell Capital 1889, 5). As it happened, the investment business hardly lasted a year. Foster told the Capital (1890, 4) that the newly adopted constitution of the State of South Dakota prohibited "the holding of lands by corporations for speculative purposes, and as that was the principal object of the company, it was deemed advisable to close up its business." But the new naming practice was off and running.
Mitchell soon had another newspaper, another Corn Belt business enterprise, the South Dakota Advocate and Corn Belt Herald (Sioux City Journal 1890, 4). What may have been the first not-for-profit enterprise with Corn Belt in the title, the Corn Belt Real Estate Association, sprang to life in Mitchell in July 1891, with plans to promote South Dakota farmland at the South Dakota State Fair and then at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (Mitchell Capital 1891, 9). That same month, also in Mitchell, "business men from the southern half of the state" organized the Corn Belt Immigration Association, which sought to raise funds inside South Dakota to assist residents "suffering on the account of crop failures" and "to induce immigration" primarily from eastern states (Chicago Daily Inter Ocean July 1891, 5). In 1892, South Dakotans held the first Corn Belt Exposition, which took place that fall in Mitchell's extravagant Corn Palace (McHenry Plaindealer 1892, 2).
While Mitchell was the hub of early enterprise-naming toward the Corn Belt's western margin, residents of Bloomington, Illinois, near the heart of the Illinois Grand Prairie and in the eastern core of the Corn Belt, were by 1891 ready to inaugurate their own naming tradition. One wonders whether the custom had diffused eastward from South Dakota or if Bloomington developed as an independent innovational hearth. The first inkling that Bloomington was going to join the naming parade came in a tiny segment of a long piece about happenings in various Illinois cities. Bear in mind that there can be a lag between the founding of an enterprise and its initial listing by a city directory, or between enterprise demise and its final listing. Furthermore, an enterprise does not have to broadcast its existence in a city directory, although a for-profit entity like a bank would welcome a standard listing and might pay extra for a display advertisement. Directories will not pick up every enterprise, particularly those that either cannot afford to participate, do not wish their address to be public, or choose not to see their name in print. Sometimes directory field personnel simply fail to capture enterprises. Though authoritative and an excellent source for study of a naming practice over time, city directories are not perfect. In any given year, they tend to understate the actual number of enterprises.  (1937)(1938)(1939)(1940)(1941)(1942)(1943)(1944)(1945)(1946)(1947)(1948)(1949)(1950)(1951)(1952)(1953). Median directory life for an enterprise is eight years, a number that splits the seven years of the Corn Belt Cigar Store (1905)(1906)(1907)(1908)(1909)(1910)(1911) and the nine years compiled by the Corn Belt Auto Club (1924)(1925)(1926)(1927)(1928)(1929)(1930)(1931)(1932). The mode, the most common number of directory years, is one which a total of 11 enterprises could claim, ranging from Corn Belt Traction Company (1909) to Corn Belt Collection Agency (1984). Roughly three-quarters of the Bloomington-Normal enterprises (32 of 42 or 76.19 percent) have been for-profit businesses, like Corn Belt Manufacturing (1943)(1944)(1945)(1946). The remaining 10 were (or are) not-for-profit entities, like the Corn Belt Farmers' Cooperative Association (1920) and the Corn Belt Carving Club (2017-2020).  Figure 1 reveals that the number of Corn Belt enterprises in any particular city directory ranged from 2 to 12, with a 128-year mean (1893-2020) of 5.87 enterprises per year, a median of 6, and mode of 6. The single peak year of 12 enterprises occurred in 1962; but two other directories listed 11, and five had 10 of them. The local naming custom grew through the 1890s and the first six decades of the twentieth century. Though there has been numerical slippage since the 1962 peak, no Bloomington-Normal city directory from 1893 to 2020 has been without at least a pair of enterprises with the Corn Belt designation.

Contemporary Corn Belt Enterprises
Eighty enterprises emerged as active 2020 Corn Belt or Cornbelt endeavors across the United States. Table 2 summarizes their numbers by state, indicates how many and what percentage were businesses or not-for-profit organizations, and provides examples. Leading with 30 of the 80 enterprises (37.50 percent) was Illinois; Iowa followed closely with 23 (28.75 percent). Illinois and Iowa, therefore, accounted for two-thirds of the total (66.25 percent). Indiana came in far below Illinois and Iowa, at six enterprises. South Dakota contributed five as did Nebraska; Minnesota had three; Missouri and Ohio both hosted two; and Colorado, Florida, Kentucky, and Wisconsin had one each. Of the 80 enterprises, 41 (51.25 percent) were businesses and 39 were not for profit. In terms of spelling choices, Corn Belt as two words, including one enterprise with a hyphen (Illinois's Corn-Belt Leasing Corporation), accounted for 43 of the 80 (53.75 percent). The other 37 enterprise name designators (46.25 percent) spelled the term as one word, including three (Missouri's CornBelt Regional RNA Meeting, Kentucky's CornBelt Tank Services, LLC, and Illinois's Normal CornBelters Baseball, LLC) that went with a capital "B." All but four enterprise names began with Corn Belt or Cornbelt. Of the 80 national enterprises (Table 2) Figure 2 shows a Corn Belt that the distribution of the 2020 enterprises defined, a pattern that is fairly true to statistically derived versions, such as those that I discussed above. Scattered in Ohio and eastern Indiana, enterprises began to cluster in western Indiana's portion of the Grand Prairie. That concentration intensified in a southeast-to-northwest swath through Illinois toward Iowa and the Mississippi River, reaching a peak in Bloomington-Normal with nine (seven in Bloomington and two in Normal). Once across the Mississippi, enterprises fanned out widely through Iowa, until clustering again near the western border of Iowa, with four in Omaha; Nebraska; one across the Missouri River from Omaha in

Discussion and Conclusion
Of the gods that he credited for the remarkable agricultural productivity of the Corn Belt, J. Russell Smith also said, "All this is nature's conspiracy to make man grow corn" (1925,290). The gods may have been driving farmer decisions about what to plant; but by the time Smith published his book on North America, business owners and club organizers across the Corn Belt had already appropriated Corn Belt or Cornbelt as a way to capture the positive vibe of this dynamic agricultural region in the names of their enterprises dozens, maybe hundreds, of times. That year, 1925, in Bloomington, Illinois alone, there were six Corn Belt enterprises listed in the city directory and perhaps several others unlisted. And, even though the urge to choose Corn Belt as an enterprise nominator has waned somewhat, those who still use it seem committed to its endurance.
Naming an organization, society, or commercial enterprise after the Corn Belt reveals a sense of what Kaplan (2000, 45) called "spatial identity" in that so doing conveys a message about the region to which the name givers have a special connection. "Territory creates a collective consciousness" wrote Kaplan (2000, 45). Naming an enterprise after that territory would be a satisfying confirmation of such a connection. Boddewyn (1967), Room (1982), Walasek (1983), and Rami and Arias (2007) expressed similar ideas regarding placeinspired enterprise names. In a particularly innovative investigation, Walasek (1983, 198) even singled out electric utilities for their "common use of geographic names" such as the aforementioned Corn Belt Electric Cooperative (now Corn Belt Energy).¹ Entrepreneurs often name their businesses in the hope that the moniker itself will influence favorably potential customers of their products and services. Business owners with local roots might decide to use Corn Belt to identify their enterprises to suggest to the public that they have strong ties to the region. In some cases, the use of Corn Belt in a business name might serve to encourage positive links between their goods and services and the favorable associations customers might have with the Corn Belt region (e.g., reliability, industry, wholesomeness, patriotism). Similarly, leaders of not-for-profit organizations might pick names with Corn Belt to resonate favorably with founding members and help recruit new members who also have positive associations with the region. Sometimes these enterprises will have a tie with agriculture; sometimes that will not be true. In any case, as this study has shown, for more than a century a wide variety of US-based enterprises have successfully incorporated Corn Belt into their names.
A logical continuation of this research would be to trace the evolution of the vernacular Corn Belt as defined by enterprise names. Imagine a map similar to Figure 2 but also with a closed, sinuous, smoothed polygon draped around and just beyond the outermost of the mapped enterprise communities (excluding the Florida outlier and maybe the one in Colorado). Now eliminate all the symbols marking the enterprise communities. The remaining polygon, an isogloss actually, would denote the boundary, as dialectologists Chambers and Trudgill (1998, 89) said, "between two regions with respect to some linguistic feature." In this instance, the isogloss would separate places within the polygon that had in 2020 enterprises named after the Corn Belt from nearby places where there were none with that name. Now imagine similar polygons to map successive Corn Belt regions in selected years over a century or more. How did the isoglosses enclosing all active Corn Belt enterprises compare in, say, 1900Belt enterprises compare in, say, with 1920Belt enterprises compare in, say, , 1940, and so forth?
One key source for such a map series would be the SOS databases, which typically retain the inactive enterprises, giving activation and inactivation dates. Another set of sources for such a historical approach would be newspaper databases. Newspapers would allow a researcher to focus the search for Corn Belt enterprises, as I did in the current study, on the year in question and perhaps the two preceding years. One could also consult city directories, where they exist, especially along the margins of the region. Next would come a map for each selected year, similar to the revised Figure 2 that I suggested above. If one wrapped an isogloss around the outermost enterprise communities on each map and took care to omit obvious outliers like Florida, the resulting isoglosses might reveal how the naming public was perceiving, at different points in time, the extent of the vernacular Corn Belt. Finally, one could overlay all these study-year isoglosses on a single separate map. Isoglosses might form bundles (Chambers and Trudgill 1998, 94-96) in some areas, indicating a stable boundary through time. They might reveal movement inward or outward in others, indicating a drift of the naming practice toward the core or the periphery of the Corn Belt. The footprint of the polygonal isoglosses would shift to reflect state additions and subtractions as well as the coming and going of enterprises within states. These are just a few suggestions for future research that one could undertake on the term Corn Belt in this area. The onomastic exploration of vernacular regions can do much to enrich our understanding of the complex relationship among culture, identity, language, and geography.
As this study has shown, there seems to be something attractive about the term Belt to characterize vernacular regions in the US, especially ones that have an east-west orientation. Many US "belts" have an agricultural theme like Corn Belt, but that is not always the case. In December 2020, using Newspapers.com, I performed a series of searches to determine the gross number of hits for five agricultural "belts" (Corn, Cotton, Dairy, Tobacco, and Wheat) and three non-agricultural belts (Bible, Borscht, and Rust) to check their respective strengths. I did not attempt to eliminate duplicate hits for any of the searches. Corn Belt (1,107,445 hits) easily out-returned second-ranking Cotton Belt (681,170) by over 400,000 and left the Wheat (456,710), Tobacco (40,455), and Dairy (20,482) belts even farther behind. Gross returns for the Bible (94,934), Rust (74,401), and Borscht (28,045) belts were also well below that of the Corn Belt. Future researchers could compare the history and distribution of these and other US regional markers in enterprise naming.
Alternatively, building on this study's focus upon a single regional designation, further investigations could examine other belts in depth. The Cotton Belt would be a good follow-up candidate, given its nineteenthcentury (perhaps earlier) origins and the fact that this belt moved westward across the American South as planters sought not only suitable land but also tried to outrun the scourge of the boll weevil. One could take a look at Chicago's Bungalow Belt, a name referencing street after street of detached single-family bungalows. The Borscht Belt, the resort-oriented vacationland in the Catskill Mountains of New York and Pennsylvania, would also be worth investigating to see if, when, and where it lent its name to local enterprises.
The potential does not end with belts, of course. How about Silicon Valley in California, the Valley of the Sun in Arizona, Dutch Country of Pennsylvania, the Tidewater area of Virginia, Florida's Space Coast, Maine's (and adjacent New Brunswick's) Down East, or Ontario's Golden Horseshoe? Enterprise namers may have seized on these and other regional markers for their businesses and organizations. Researchers around the globe with similar interests could also conduct analogous investigations of enterprise names that utilize designations of such regions outside of the United States. Australia's Sunshine Coast in the state of Queensland, southern Spain's Costa del Sol, London's entertainment district of Soho, and even something as large as the Middle East or the Orient come to mind as potentially fruitful avenues of onomastic research. Vernacular regions abound.